The Amiga 1200 was arguably the last and best of the golden era "console computers", (meaning all-in-ones with the CPU inside the keyboard and could display on a standard analog TV). This style of home computer largely reigned the consumer market between 1980 and 1990, beginning with 8-bit machines like the Commodore 64, Atari 400/800 and Apple II, evolving to 16-bit with the Amiga 500 and Atari 1040STE and ending with the 32-bit Amiga 1200.
The Amiga 1200 was based on a Motorola 68020, had a hardware-based bit blitter and could display 320x240 in 256 colors, basically the holy grail of analog gaming graphics modes. It was the only widely distributed home computer capable of faithfully emulating the vast majority of 1980-90 dedicated arcade machines with few compromises. I have all the machines mentioned above in pristine working condition and still enjoy playing around with them.
It was a special era in computer history because every platform had its own unique hardware and operating system providing different capabilities and trade-offs. This gives each platform an unmistakable (and strongly-opinionated) 'personality'.
The 68020 is probably the last great CPU to write pure assembly in, too. The instruction set is rich enough to make it straightforward to write by hand - unlike RISC-ier chips, C is almost superfluous for many tasks - but simple and clean enough to keep in your head (unlike x86). It cleans up some of the rough edges from the 68000, and adds some great features and a ton of speed. But: no MMU, no complex pipeline or branch prediction, and the cache is instruction-only, meaning you rarely need to think about it to get optimum performance.
I disagree that RISC chips are especially hard to write for by hand - plenty of people did exactly that for the Acorn Archimedes. (And writing by hand can still be worthwhile even when you're lacking fancy CISC instructions, because you can design bespoke, custom-use "calling conventions" that make way better use of the register file. This is hard to do in C even when theoretically possible-- via fancy, non-standard asm intrinsics-- because you don't know beforehand how the compiler will choose to allocate registers.) The MC68k architecture proved a dead end, and this is ultimately what would have doomed the Amiga installed base, even if Commodore hadn't been mismanaged to the extent it was.
I think its too much to lump all RISC chips in the same bucket.
I have written some assembler for MIPS and Alpha AXP back in the day. The mips assembler was quite straight forward and reasonable but I found the alpha to be very hard.
Another thing that made this era special is that these were meant to be mass market devices in which it was kind of assumed that most owners would want to learn basic programming (usually in BASIC, no pun intended) to get the most out of their devices. The machines came with manuals including programming tutorials.
> The Amiga 1200 was arguably the last and best of the golden era "console computers", (meaning all-in-ones with the CPU inside the keyboard and could display on a standard analog TV).
Surely if "last and best" is your criterion, one can hardly discount the Atari Falcon. (And the earliest models in the Acorn Archimedes line were definitely "all-in-ones" integrating a keyboard although they might have lacked in-built TV out.)
The Acorn A3010 was the only "home" computer, targeted at the non-educational market, that Acorn ever made. It is distinguished by being the only Acorn computer with green (not red or grey) function keys, and also by being the only Acorn computer to which Econet could not be fitted. And it had a TV-out.
At the time it was launched, 1992, the ARM2 processor inside it was considerably more powerful than workstations that could be bought for ten times the price. It was insanely powerful, but hamstrung by not having any form of graphics acceleration. (The CPU was so fast it was just assumed you'd do everything in the CPU.)
It's a shame, really. RISC OS running on ARM deserved to be the British standard of computing, but Acorn's failure in the US market meant they could not compete with the sheer PR power of the large American competition.
What made the Amiga great is that this was not just a bit but way more advanced than anything out there. When I had to, reluctantly, switch to a 386 PC, this was very painful because it felt like going backwards in time by several years. A friend of mine had an Amiga 1000 (it came out in 1985, before the 500 whic surfaced in 1987): going to his home was witnessing the future.
Fun sidenote: I recently found I still have my bootleg 5"1/4 Amiga floppy drive reader: this was way cheaper than buying 3"1/2 disks. If you planned to buy more than 30 floppies, it was cheaper to buy a 5"1/4 drive and 30 5"1/4 floppies than it was to buy only 30 3"1/2 floppies. We'd add a switch at the back of the Amiga to decide from which drive to boot. I plan to open that drive one of these days and see how it was made.
My Dad bought the family computer for Christmas, 1985. It was an Amiga 1000 and I still vividly remember him teaching me to type "dpaint" at the command line to fire up DeluxePaint. (IRRC, the DeluxePaint disk didn't come with even a minimal Workbench environment on it, just an AmigaDOS window). I was 6 years old.
I used that machine for 10 years. I made drawings and animations (DP III), added titles to the silly camcorder tapes my friends and I made (DeluxeVideo), wrote book reports (ProWrite), made Christmas and birthday cards (various), composed music (Music Studio), played games, and did some light exploring of the system itself, playing with startup-sequence to improve boot times and customize things.
It wasn't until I was a junior in high school that I switched to a 486, and it felt like a step backward in many ways. Of course it was much faster, and had a hard-drive (my first ever), and the resolution was (only a bit!) better. But it was still limited to 16 colors, only 640x480, and all the software was bland business-y bullshit.
I have nothing but fond memories of that machine, and I wish Amiga had been more successful in the market. It took a decade to get back to where they would have been had the trajectory continued from their 1985 launch.
When I went with the 10 MHz 8088 with a 40 MB hard drive I also looked at the alternatives of getting either the Amiga 500 or just getting a Lt. Kernal 20 MB hard drive for my 128.
The driving factor for needing more storage of course was for my BBS at the time.
Wow, “Lt. Kernal 20 MB” is something I haven’t thought about in ages. A friend of mine bought whatever the competitor to the Lt. Kernal was at the time, used, and it was a complete lemon — he never got it working and never recouped his money. I wish I could remember the name of it — he was going to start his own BBS called and I was going to be a subop.
I was a hard-core BBS user back in that era but never actually ran one, so I went 64 > 128 > Amiga 500 > 386.
I remember, sometime in '91 or '92 getting into a flaming argument on a local BBS message board about why the Amiga was better than the PCs at the time. While Amigas weren't common in the U.S. mid-Atlantic at the time they did have a small following of die-hards (even then!) and even a very nice retail store at the local mall. A couple of my friends even had Amigas that I enjoyed playing games on from time to time.
The arguments even then were frozen in time, look at all the Amiga HAM mode colors vs your 286s CGA! Ha! PC beeper vs the Amiga's sweet 4-channel digital sound. and on and on.
Meanwhile, I typed my angry responses on my 33 MHz 80386 with a 387 math co processor, a sound blaster, and VGA graphics on a system with a case actually designed to hold a hard-drive and 2 entire MB of RAM. I was bewildered at this stranger's insistence that their thoroughly hacked A500 was a better system. I was even recently introduced to the demoscene and while the Amiga demos had better design, the PC demos of the time were really quite spectacular, introducing real-time 3d in ways nothing at the time could hope to match.
It was an angry, bitter argument that went on for weeks until we both tired of it and gave up.
Looking back what I really remember was the resentment at losing their platform. Of investing and heading down a spectacular evolutionary dead-end and a desire for it not to be wiped away by boring beige boxes that lacked any of the passion or wit that the creators of the Amiga had infused into their creation.
What made Amigas great was the creative life energy that was weaved throughout it more than any specific technical considerations. If the Apple Macs were created with the taste of expert graphic designers, and PCs by accountants, the Amiga was made by the kind of anarchist creatives who would later on go to make things like the early Burning Man, perfect the 90s counter-culture digital art movements like the demoscene, off-beat public access videos with the video toaster, the epic Babylon 5, and allow bedroom game coders to absolutely maximize their art. It was the seed that gave visual representation to earlier cyberpunk.
It influenced everything and no lessons were learned from it.
> Looking back what I really remember was the resentment at losing their platform. Of investing and heading down a spectacular evolutionary dead-end and a desire for it not to be wiped away by boring beige boxes that lacked any of the passion or wit that the creators of the Amiga had infused into their creation.
You put into words the feeling I've held onto for 25 years. When I finally gave up on my A1000 and moved to Windows on a 486, it felt like a loss to be grieved.
> What made Amigas great was the creative life energy that was weaved throughout it more than any specific technical considerations. If the Apple Macs were created with the taste of expert graphic designers, and PCs by accountants, the Amiga was made by the kind of anarchist creatives who would later on go to make things like the early Burning Man, perfect the 90s counter-culture digital art movements like the demoscene, off-beat public access videos with the video toaster, the epic Babylon 5, and allow bedroom game coders to absolutely maximize their art. It was the seed that gave visual representation to earlier cyberpunk.
Seriously, you're capturing my memory of this platform perfectly. The Mac was the nearest thing to an Amiga, but it was still lacking in some hard-to-pin-down way that I think you just nailed.
IMHO Macs were not all that great at that time (early 90's). I think what came closest to the "Amiga experience" were NeXT and Silicon Graphics workstations, at 20x..100x the price.
>Meanwhile, I typed my angry responses on my 33 MHz 80386 with a 387 math co processor, a sound blaster, and VGA graphics on a system with a case actually designed to hold a hard-drive and 2 entire MB of RAM.
... which cost you a fortune and yet was still worse than the oldest and cheapest Amiga, nevermind the A1200 which was made available around that time.
I finally "upgraded" to an Athlon with Linux in 2000. I do not feel like I missed anything in between; Through the years, I had lots of chances to extensively use 386/486 with DOS and Pentiums with Windows 9x elsewhere than home, and at no point I thought the user experience held a candle to my Amiga, which by the way was just an A500 with 1MB RAM and no hard drive.
By '91 the PC was finally starting to catch up. In the late 80s the Amiga was far superior, at least as far as consumer priced equipment goes. I was in the process of switching from my beloved A500 to a 386sx-40(IIRC) in '91 when law enforcement confiscated them all, but I remember wanting a PC for more power.
Unlike other books about retro it does not only try to trigger your nostalgia but is an actual deep dive into the history and the technology about this machine.
For example: It explains in detail how the famous „Boing Ball“ demo used all of the Amiga‘s custom chips to keep the CPU almost idle while running. This was important for showing off the preemptive multitasking capabilities of the Amiga OS.
It also includes a thorough look into the implementation details of Deluxe Paint I and how the IFF format came to be.
I haven't read that book, but your description reminds me of this recent video which I thought did a good job explaining why the Amiga was so great: https://youtu.be/PHN8ANlR8KI
As a kid in a computer store in 1987, it was a pretty easy choice. The PC was either monochrome or 4 color CGA graphics. The amiga had a 3d ray traced animation of juggling spheres.
The Mac II could display millions of colours, but not at the same time.
From wikipedia:
"The Macintosh II includes a graphics card that supports a true-color 16.7 million color palette and was available in two configurations: 4-bit and 8-bit. The 4-bit model supports 16 colors on a 640×480 display and 256 colors (8-bit video) on a 512×384 display ..."
There were optional video RAM upgrades, but none that gave you 'millions of colours at 640x480'.
Wikipedia also notes: "The video card does not include hardware acceleration of drawing operations."
Also, for comparison, in 1987 when the Mac II came out (two years after the Amiga 1000) you could buy a Mac II for USD$5,500 or the Amiga for USD$1300.
As much as I respect Dillon, I can't say I've seen anything about DragonflyBSD that suggests it includes anything of what made AmigaOS interesting. Maybe there's more in the internals. I'd love to know more about it.
Yeah I'm mostly being tounge in cheek. Looking forward to when my kid is old enough and can start tinkering with an Arduino for example (nothing quite like that around when I was a kid).
Readit News
The Amiga 1200 was based on a Motorola 68020, had a hardware-based bit blitter and could display 320x240 in 256 colors, basically the holy grail of analog gaming graphics modes. It was the only widely distributed home computer capable of faithfully emulating the vast majority of 1980-90 dedicated arcade machines with few compromises. I have all the machines mentioned above in pristine working condition and still enjoy playing around with them.
It was a special era in computer history because every platform had its own unique hardware and operating system providing different capabilities and trade-offs. This gives each platform an unmistakable (and strongly-opinionated) 'personality'.
I have written some assembler for MIPS and Alpha AXP back in the day. The mips assembler was quite straight forward and reasonable but I found the alpha to be very hard.
Surely if "last and best" is your criterion, one can hardly discount the Atari Falcon. (And the earliest models in the Acorn Archimedes line were definitely "all-in-ones" integrating a keyboard although they might have lacked in-built TV out.)
At the time it was launched, 1992, the ARM2 processor inside it was considerably more powerful than workstations that could be bought for ten times the price. It was insanely powerful, but hamstrung by not having any form of graphics acceleration. (The CPU was so fast it was just assumed you'd do everything in the CPU.)
It's a shame, really. RISC OS running on ARM deserved to be the British standard of computing, but Acorn's failure in the US market meant they could not compete with the sheer PR power of the large American competition.
Photos and details: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A3010.h...
Was just an Atari. Braindead architecture throughout.
It is remarkable how the 68030 still had to wait for its turn to access RAM. Like the ST, Falcon had no concept of FAST RAM.
Falcon had a cool DSP chip in it, but that's about it.
I keep looking at my mechnical keyboard and thinking it ought to be possible to squeeze a NUC like computer in there.
Fun sidenote: I recently found I still have my bootleg 5"1/4 Amiga floppy drive reader: this was way cheaper than buying 3"1/2 disks. If you planned to buy more than 30 floppies, it was cheaper to buy a 5"1/4 drive and 30 5"1/4 floppies than it was to buy only 30 3"1/2 floppies. We'd add a switch at the back of the Amiga to decide from which drive to boot. I plan to open that drive one of these days and see how it was made.
I used that machine for 10 years. I made drawings and animations (DP III), added titles to the silly camcorder tapes my friends and I made (DeluxeVideo), wrote book reports (ProWrite), made Christmas and birthday cards (various), composed music (Music Studio), played games, and did some light exploring of the system itself, playing with startup-sequence to improve boot times and customize things.
It wasn't until I was a junior in high school that I switched to a 486, and it felt like a step backward in many ways. Of course it was much faster, and had a hard-drive (my first ever), and the resolution was (only a bit!) better. But it was still limited to 16 colors, only 640x480, and all the software was bland business-y bullshit.
I have nothing but fond memories of that machine, and I wish Amiga had been more successful in the market. It took a decade to get back to where they would have been had the trajectory continued from their 1985 launch.
When I went with the 10 MHz 8088 with a 40 MB hard drive I also looked at the alternatives of getting either the Amiga 500 or just getting a Lt. Kernal 20 MB hard drive for my 128.
The driving factor for needing more storage of course was for my BBS at the time.
In all I’m happy I went the IBM compat route.
I was a hard-core BBS user back in that era but never actually ran one, so I went 64 > 128 > Amiga 500 > 386.
The arguments even then were frozen in time, look at all the Amiga HAM mode colors vs your 286s CGA! Ha! PC beeper vs the Amiga's sweet 4-channel digital sound. and on and on.
Meanwhile, I typed my angry responses on my 33 MHz 80386 with a 387 math co processor, a sound blaster, and VGA graphics on a system with a case actually designed to hold a hard-drive and 2 entire MB of RAM. I was bewildered at this stranger's insistence that their thoroughly hacked A500 was a better system. I was even recently introduced to the demoscene and while the Amiga demos had better design, the PC demos of the time were really quite spectacular, introducing real-time 3d in ways nothing at the time could hope to match.
It was an angry, bitter argument that went on for weeks until we both tired of it and gave up.
Looking back what I really remember was the resentment at losing their platform. Of investing and heading down a spectacular evolutionary dead-end and a desire for it not to be wiped away by boring beige boxes that lacked any of the passion or wit that the creators of the Amiga had infused into their creation.
What made Amigas great was the creative life energy that was weaved throughout it more than any specific technical considerations. If the Apple Macs were created with the taste of expert graphic designers, and PCs by accountants, the Amiga was made by the kind of anarchist creatives who would later on go to make things like the early Burning Man, perfect the 90s counter-culture digital art movements like the demoscene, off-beat public access videos with the video toaster, the epic Babylon 5, and allow bedroom game coders to absolutely maximize their art. It was the seed that gave visual representation to earlier cyberpunk.
It influenced everything and no lessons were learned from it.
You put into words the feeling I've held onto for 25 years. When I finally gave up on my A1000 and moved to Windows on a 486, it felt like a loss to be grieved.
> What made Amigas great was the creative life energy that was weaved throughout it more than any specific technical considerations. If the Apple Macs were created with the taste of expert graphic designers, and PCs by accountants, the Amiga was made by the kind of anarchist creatives who would later on go to make things like the early Burning Man, perfect the 90s counter-culture digital art movements like the demoscene, off-beat public access videos with the video toaster, the epic Babylon 5, and allow bedroom game coders to absolutely maximize their art. It was the seed that gave visual representation to earlier cyberpunk.
Seriously, you're capturing my memory of this platform perfectly. The Mac was the nearest thing to an Amiga, but it was still lacking in some hard-to-pin-down way that I think you just nailed.
... which cost you a fortune and yet was still worse than the oldest and cheapest Amiga, nevermind the A1200 which was made available around that time.
I finally "upgraded" to an Athlon with Linux in 2000. I do not feel like I missed anything in between; Through the years, I had lots of chances to extensively use 386/486 with DOS and Pentiums with Windows 9x elsewhere than home, and at no point I thought the user experience held a candle to my Amiga, which by the way was just an A500 with 1MB RAM and no hard drive.
PCs just sucked. Quake was cool, though.
The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga
https://www.amazon.de/dp/0262535696/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i...
Unlike other books about retro it does not only try to trigger your nostalgia but is an actual deep dive into the history and the technology about this machine.
For example: It explains in detail how the famous „Boing Ball“ demo used all of the Amiga‘s custom chips to keep the CPU almost idle while running. This was important for showing off the preemptive multitasking capabilities of the Amiga OS.
It also includes a thorough look into the implementation details of Deluxe Paint I and how the IFF format came to be.
I loved it!
This is literally the linked video in the article. (it's a good one though, watched it last night)
The Workbench 3.0 Utility disk included a copy of MicroEmacs. Decades later still my favourite editor and top 5 piece of software.
The Mac II could display millions of colours, but not at the same time.
From wikipedia:
"The Macintosh II includes a graphics card that supports a true-color 16.7 million color palette and was available in two configurations: 4-bit and 8-bit. The 4-bit model supports 16 colors on a 640×480 display and 256 colors (8-bit video) on a 512×384 display ..."
There were optional video RAM upgrades, but none that gave you 'millions of colours at 640x480'.
Wikipedia also notes: "The video card does not include hardware acceleration of drawing operations."
Also, for comparison, in 1987 when the Mac II came out (two years after the Amiga 1000) you could buy a Mac II for USD$5,500 or the Amiga for USD$1300.
https://www.dragonflybsd.org/
Matt Dillon has brought a ton of design from Amiga to his FreeBSD fork called DragonflyBSD.
And its extremely performant, which is impressive given how few work on DragonflyBSD vs Linux & other BSDs.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=corei9-f...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12221466
And a bit here too
https://www.trollaxor.com/2012/05/miss-amiga-try-dragonfly.h...